Week 2 Blog

Week 2 of class was pretty interesting. We continued to do work in groups and explore different aspects of grouping.

I actually really liked the Tuckman stages of development portion that we worked on Thursday, so I decided to look into it a little more and try to understand it fully. At first when we were learning about it My first thought was that Storming was absolutely a bad thing to have during the grouping phase and I thought to myself "is there any good that can come out of the storming phase" and I came to a little conclusion about it using the readings, my ideas and from Boundless

From my understanding based off the two readings the storming phase is a time where the team begins to formulate ideas. There is a constant fear of acceptance, rejection, and consideration that causes tension between members. And on top of this there are can be conflicts with roles, who is to lead? who is to do what? as the reading from class uses as an example, is there a reward system? Due to this there can be less motivation and groups can even fall apart during this. So how could this be possibly good for a group?

I believe that groups become stronger when they can over come a conflict like this or when they can sort out roles. After roles can be finalized and everyone understands what they need to do, the groups goals and functions a group will be stronger than ever. As long as the group can surpass this part of the process and continue together then the rest of the Tuckman stages are very simple to do. It just requires patience.

Heres to week 3, hoping to learn about something else interesting and continue to work with everyone.

Week 1 Blog

Good afternoon folks,
I'm Caleb Smith, Junior here at the University of Arizona studying Business. I was born here in Tucson, Arizona however I travel to Maryland during the summer.

         Its a new year, 2017 and the world is changing. Our President uses social medias to keep in touch with the people and through social media we are able to connect with the world in a much easier manner than even just a few years ago. What may this be useful for? Communication and Collaboration. Communicating and collaborating aids in knowledge being shared as well as the ability to work with one another when you are far apart. From the reading "What is Collaboration Anyway" it discusses the different ways that collaboration is for filled through electronic means. Wikipedia is mentioned as a way that people collaborate, as well as aggregation. Information is added to an Article of wikipedia by the means of the people, and if information is pulled from areas that were not intended to be used in collaboration are aggregated for this sort of use (cited obviously).

       There are aspects of working together that we read about in the Tina Fey's Rules of Improvisation that I agree with fully, its a group effort to do something. You can't just not contribute during collaboration, you need to add to something and continue going along. Final little tidbit I'd like to mention about things we've learned in class was from the TedTalk and the digitization of books from his RECAPTCHAs. Its amazing how its possible to get all of these people to work towards immortalizing human knowledge, even if they do not know that they are helping. The power that the internet has given us can allow for some really amazing feats.

New year, new semester, it should be pretty interesting, looking forward to working with everyone and having an enjoyable class.

Caleb